Natural Gas Feeds Half the World. Here's the Inconvenient Truth.
The Dual Reality of Natural Gas: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Energy, Food, and the Path Forward
By Bryan J. Kaus
This is me getting back to my roots.
Energy isn’t a talking point for me - it’s where I started, where my family’s story runs deep, and where I’ve spent my career moving between strategy and execution across oil, gas, and renewables. What follows comes from decades of operating experience, late-night debates with engineers and economists, and relentless curiosity about how things actually work. I make no apologies for this background. Energy is the substrate of modern life. If you care about human flourishing, you have to care about reliability, affordability, and emissions at the same time.
What follows is a net-zero argument, not an absolute-zero fantasy. Cut emissions fast where we can, balance the hard-to-abate remainder with durable removals, and keep food and energy systems reliable as we transition. Net zero means small residual emissions are neutralized through offsets and removal; absolute zero everywhere, on today’s timeline, simply isn’t realistic.
Let me be direct: in an age of polarized shouting - some demanding we “shut down all drilling now,” others insisting we “drill baby drill” without restraint - the middle road isn’t just refreshing. It’s essential. And it’s where the real work happens.
Holding Two Truths at Once
Natural gas embodies a dual reality that makes people uncomfortable:
Indispensable to how we live - power, heat, industry, materials, and food.
Imperfect, with real environmental costs we must measure, manage, and reduce.
Great operators hold both truths without flinching and then get to work. That’s the approach I’m bringing here: educate with objective facts, win over the doers who seek practical solutions, and move beyond the noise. Because simply pointing out problems isn’t enough - frankly, it’s lazy. We need to highlight solutions and spark authentic movement toward sustainable innovation.
Beyond “Just a Fuel”
Most people think of natural gas as the blue flame on a stovetop or fuel for power plants. But it underpins far more of modern life than we realize.
Natural gas is a foundational feedstock for countless materials that make the modern world possible. Ethane, propane, and other natural gas liquids feed petrochemical crackers that become polymers and plastics - from IV tubing and sterile medical packaging to components in smartphones, cars, and protective equipment. Synthetic plastics that we rely on daily are typically derived from petroleum and natural gas inputs. We’re talking about medical equipment, food packaging, infrastructure materials, and technology components that have no ready substitutes at scale and cost.
As of 2022, natural gas supplied roughly a quarter of the world’s primary energy a significant chunk of the ~82% of global energy still derived from fossil fuels. When burned, it produces less air pollution and CO₂ per unit of heat than coal or oil, which is why many countries turned to it as a “bridge fuel.” That said, burning gas still emits carbon dioxide, and any leaks release methane - more on these downsides in a moment.
But here’s what catches most people off guard: natural gas is the hidden ingredient behind the world’s food abundance.
The Fertilizer That Feeds Half the World
Through the Haber-Bosch process, hydrogen - today largely sourced from natural gas is combined with atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia, the backbone of nitrogen fertilizer.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Best estimates suggest that synthetic nitrogen fertilizer underpins roughly 40–50% of global food production. Nearly half of humanity today owes its existence to this process. Without these fertilizers, crop harvests might be only about half of current levels -a scenario that would spell hunger for billions.
This is not theoretical. If we eliminated natural gas overnight, we would also eliminate the main source of affordable ammonia fertilizer, causing global food output to plummet. Yields of staple crops would crash in the following seasons. Unlike theoretical discussions of climate impacts decades from now, this food crisis would unfold within months - a truly inconvenient truth for anyone advocating immediate fossil fuel shutdowns.
Now here’s the dual truth: ammonia production is life-saving and emissions-intensive. Producing fertilizer accounts for roughly 2% of global final energy use and about 1.3% of energy-system CO₂ emissions. The Haber-Bosch process itself is extremely energy-intensive. Moreover, overuse of nitrogen fertilizer causes water pollution, soil degradation, and releases nitrous oxide - a potent greenhouse gas.
We are forced to hold both realities: nitrogen fertilizer is indispensable for food security and a significant environmental problem.
The pragmatic takeaway? It’s not that we should abandon synthetic fertilizer (which would be catastrophic), but that we must innovate to use it smarter and cleaner. This includes improving fertilizer efficiency so crops absorb more and less runs off, developing greener production methods using renewable hydrogen instead of natural gas, and exploring alternative soil nutrients where possible.
“Why Don’t People Just Move?”
Here’s something that gets lost in abstract policy discussions: when systems fail, most people cannot simply relocate to abundance.
Resource limits, conflict, and poverty trap populations in place. When agricultural systems collapse and famine strikes—as we’re seeing in parts of Sudan today - people with means may migrate to escape hardship, but most cannot. This isn’t political; it’s physics and human constraint. That’s why resilient inputs - energy, fertilizer, logistics - matter so much.
This human reality underscores why preventing food crises through robust global supply is not optional. It’s foundational to any serious energy transition plan.
The Dutch Case: Turning Constraints Into Abundance
Want to see pragmatic innovation in action? Look at the Netherlands. This example resonated with me when I first encountered it in Ed Conway’s Material World and the more I’ve dug into it, the more it illustrates everything about the energy-food nexus that people miss.
Despite its small size (about the area of Maryland) and often gray, cool weather, the Netherlands became the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter by value - trailing only the much larger United States. How? High-tech, climate-controlled greenhouses that run on steady heat and power.
For decades, Dutch growers used cheap natural gas from the Groningen field to create summer-like conditions even in winter. Gas boilers and cogeneration plants provided heat and electricity to vast greenhouse complexes. The results were stunning - yields under glass are many times higher per acre than traditional open-field yields. By controlling climate, light, and CO₂ levels (often by burning natural gas to enrich CO₂ for plant growth), Dutch greenhouses achieved productivity that seemed impossible outdoors.
That’s systems thinking: technology × energy × capital × know-how turning constraints into competitive advantage.
But here’s the tension: those same greenhouses consume about 9% of the Netherlands’ entire natural gas supply. For a climate-progressive nation pushing aggressive emission cuts, that’s not a footnote - it’s a fundamental challenge. Now, with volatile gas prices and mounting pressure to decarbonize, Dutch agriculture faces a reckoning. How do you maintain the food output and competitive edge you spent decades building without the energy source that made it possible?
The Dutch government and growers are working through solutions - geothermal heating, better insulation, seasonal heat storage in aquifers, switching to electric heating and LED lighting powered by renewables. None are simple or cheap. During high price periods, some growers have taken drastic steps: temporary shutdowns, colder temperatures, shorter growing seasons. Each involves real trade-offs in yield, finances, or crop quality.
This is what energy transition actually looks like on the ground - not clean abstraction, but messy optimization under constraints. Progress without pretending the dependence wasn’t real. That’s the model worth studying.
Why Both Extremes Fail
As of the latest global accounting, fossil fuels still supply over 80% of primary energy worldwide.
Shutting them off tomorrow collapses food production, transportation, and industry. That’s not hyperbole - it’s arithmetic. The ensuing global calamity - energy shortages, economic free-fall, famine - would arguably be a greater immediate catastrophe than the gradual worsening of climate change.
On the other hand, producing without limits ignores atmospheric physics and real externalities. The climate costs are real, measurable, and mounting.
The pragmatic mandate is clear: accelerate clean supply, decarbonize hard-to-abate demand, and sequence change so reliability and affordability hold while emissions fall. That’s portfolio discipline applied to civilization itself.
This is why virtually all international plans target “net zero” by 2050 rather than “absolute zero.” The distinction is critical. Absolute zero means emitting no greenhouse gases whatsoever - an ideal that is effectively impossible in the near term. Net zero acknowledges that some emissions will persist (aviation, certain industrial processes), but balances them with carbon removals or offsets to achieve overall neutral impact.
Even in the most aggressive scenarios, certain uses of fossil fuels will remain by 2050. That’s where carbon capture or offsets come in to neutralize the remainder. Modern society quite literally runs on fossil fuels, and while that must change, it cannot happen with the flip of a switch.
Accepting this isn’t defeatism - it’s strategy. It focuses efforts on pragmatic decarbonization: cleaning up 90-98% of emissions via clean tech and efficiency, and handling the rest through removals. That beats chasing an impossible ideal that stalls progress.
Net-Zero Pragmatism in Practice: What Doers Actually Do
Here’s what serious operators focus on:
Measure what matters. Methane leak detection and repair, fertilizer use-efficiency, real-time intensity metrics. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Decarbonize feedstocks. Pilot green and blue ammonia where the economics work; prioritize no-regrets efficiency retrofits in existing plants before wholesale replacement.
Electrify wisely. Electrify where grids are clean enough and loads are suitable; keep firm capacity for process heat and peak reliability while grids catch up. Not everything can or should be electrified immediately.
Price risk honestly. Treat methane leakage, nitrous oxide emissions, and waste as costed risks; reward abatement that survives contact with unit economics.
Sequence for compounding returns. Win now with efficiency gains to earn the right to win later with process overhauls and novel chemistries.
Design for variance. Build in inventories, storage, redundancy. Assume supply and demand shocks because they will happen.
Tell the truth early. Under-communicated risk becomes reputational debt. Over-promise on timelines and you lose credibility when it matters most.
Circularity: Promising But Not Free
One concept gaining traction is the circular economy - breaking the “take-make-waste” linear model by designing products and systems for reuse, recycling, and regeneration.
In theory, circular approaches to energy and materials could drastically reduce waste and pollution. Imagine capturing carbon from industrial exhaust and turning it into new fuel or plastic, or recycling every component of a decommissioned wind turbine. The circular carbon economy framework is essentially an attempt to keep using hydrocarbons while capturing and reusing the carbon so it never hits the atmosphere.
It’s attractive. But circularity isn’t free.
Many recycling or waste-to-resource processes are technologically complex and not yet cost-effective. Some initiatives are cost centers that protect license to operate and future economics, not profit centers today. Recycling certain materials may use more energy than producing new material unless the energy source is fully green. Retrofitting systems to capture waste often requires expensive equipment and can reduce efficiency.
Smart operators pilot, learn, and scale where the math works without pretending every loop closes at a profit on first pass. From a business perspective, this means accepting that some initiatives will be expenses incurred for long-term sustainability and compliance. The payoff comes indirectly through avoided fines, meeting consumer expectations, staying ahead of regulations, or building goodwill or in the longer term when resource prices rise and early investments start paying back.
There is no single silver bullet. We will need a suite of solutions: renewable energy scale-up, energy storage improvements, carbon capture for unavoidable emissions, efficiency gains everywhere, electrification of transport, sustainable farming techniques, and even nuclear or hydrogen for certain applications. Each comes with its own trade-offs, costs, and benefits. Some will fail; others will thrive.
The un-sexy truth is that the future will be powered by a mosaic of technologies and systems, not one miracle source, no matter how many will promise you their way is the cure-all.
The Operating Stance: How to Navigate the Middle Road
When it comes to energy and climate, the discourse is often dominated by loud voices at the extremes. Neither offers a viable path forward. The real work and the real opportunity - lies in the nuanced middle ground occupied by pragmatists and problem-solvers.
Adopting a middle-road mindset doesn’t mean lacking conviction. It means holding two truths at once and working toward solutions that address both. It shifts the discussion from “Gas: yes or no?” to “How do we maximize the good and minimize the bad going forward?” That’s a constructive conversation one that invites engineers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and community leaders to the table to hash out actionable steps.
This approach attracts the doers, the people who roll up their sleeves to implement real changes. Doers have little interest in purity tests or blaming others; they want to solve problems in tangible ways. To win them over (and we must, if we’re to succeed), the narrative needs to be factual, practical, and hopeful.
Frankly, many of us are exhausted by the shouting matches that dominate social media and politics. If all someone does is harp on negatives without offering a path forward, that approach is rightfully seen as counterproductive. It’s time to pivot. We should demand of any critic: “Okay, and what is your solution?”- and keep asking until the focus shifts to problem-solving.
Here’s my operating stance, built over decades in this sector:
Truth over noise. Acknowledge dual realities: indispensable and imperfect. Both are true.
Resilience over ideology. Manage reliability, affordability, and emissions together, not as competing absolutes.
Execution over applause. Build measurable plans that survive contact with physics, finance, and people.
Adopting a big-picture, systems view is absolutely necessary for driving energy innovation forward. If we stay stuck in silo thinking, optimizing one piece of the puzzle while ignoring others we risk missing the forest for the trees. True resilience and sustainability come from integrating across silos: ensuring our electric grid remains reliable while it gets cleaner, addressing economic justice while deploying new technologies so solutions are broadly accepted.
It’s a juggling act, but one we can manage with thoughtful design and willingness to consider multiple variables at once.
Moving Forward
The road ahead is neither purely black nor white. It’s a shade of pragmatic gray that we must navigate with open minds.
A movement built on acknowledging reality in its fullness rather than cherry-picking convenient truths will inherently be more credible and persuasive. Such a movement can galvanize people from different sides because it respects their valid concerns while challenging them to work together on creative compromises.
Yes, we face daunting challenges: climate change and weather volatility, resource constraints, ecological pressures. But we also have tremendous capability to innovate and adapt. Yes, fossil fuels have helped build the modern world, and yes, we now need to reinvent our world to ease off those same fuels. Both statements hold true.
Legacy isn’t built in temples of words; it’s built in the present - deals struck, plants commissioned, leaks fixed, agronomy improved, grids reinforced. That’s where I’ve lived my career, and it’s where I’ll keep working: with anyone serious about building durable value in energy and beyond.
The authentic voice comes from experience, not ideology. The competitive edge comes from seeing what others miss. And the influence comes from being right about what matters and then executing on it.
Let’s replace extremes with strategy, replace noise with knowledge, and replace paralysis with progress.
The era of authentic, informed action starts now. Everyone is invited.
If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. The conversation changes when enough people understand what’s actually at stake and what’s actually possible.
Further Reading: Ed Conway’s Material World is essential for understanding how the physical realities of energy and materials shape everything we take for granted.